


A Fragmentary Songbook

by ClockworkRainbow



Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, discontinued, shaping gradually into a story, sometimes I just like to frolic wildly with headcanons
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-05
Updated: 2019-07-22
Packaged: 2020-02-26 17:59:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 19,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18722107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClockworkRainbow/pseuds/ClockworkRainbow
Summary: The pieces flutter as time passes, scattered on the winds. The tune is forgotten, but the rhythm underneath, persistent, always finds the three of them once again.





	1. Faces

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On a small stop in their journey, Link and Sheik have a discussion about faces.

            When Sheik’s fingers still upon the harp, he asks, abruptly: “What are you?”

            Link’s breath stops in his throat- an interception of the tongue, not letting his thoughts voice a discordant shriek on the flute. He lowers the instrument, carefully- as it is old, and he’s told it was his mother’s, once, the way that he is told many things, that he isn’t sure whether or not he believes, but his mind clings to regardless. And he seeks to assemble his mind, pluck the notes so that he might whistle them, but they are words, and their cadence is not so intuitive.

            “…Could ask you the same, I guess,” he says, in the same, noncommittal way his words tend to snake out of his mouth. People have called him unkind things- a mumbler, a stutterer, slow-witted or simply a coward. He is not often proud of words, when they escape him, and he does not often voice them without modifiers- the dampeners of hums, the staccato of ‘uh’, the legato of “maybe,”

            “It is not the same,” Sheik says, and his certainty is an enviable skin of ice. His bronze skin is chapped and worn by the road; his fingertips, he leaves bare, for they are cut, by harp strings and bowstrings, frayed by the grip of sword, knife, rope and rein, until they are as hardened as bone. It is Hyrulean country they find themselves in, the fat and prosperous mainland, and these are unkind lands to the Sheikah, so today, his face is in shadows cast by hood and scarf. The scarlet of his eyes is darkened to brown, and perhaps the escaping strand of white hair is merely a more fashionable platinum blonde. His high, sharp cheekbones, visible above the scarf, mark him as handsome; leaning against the tree he is tall, and his manner elegant, and a village girl fetching water from the well finds him charming and hesitates a bit too long, drinking in the sight. He does not seem to notice.

            “I am always myself,” Zelda says, and she is not shadowed, but bright, so bright that it cuts the eye, her undyed dress and costly tyrian coat weighing as heavy, austere layers. In her earlobes twinkle sapphires, another gleams in a setting of silver that spreads against her collarbones, in the shape of the rays of the sun. Embroidery threads pick a pattern of wings across her shoulders; her skin is a perfect pale, polished marble. She speaks with her head lofted, as if reciting to a crowd that Link cannot see or hear. Her heavy lace gloves climb her arms until they disappear into her sleeves. It is only the faintest dusting, a crown of silver at the roots of her golden hair that suggests it is anything but a natural color, a great length of it braided in the small of her back, falling in a thick rope between the woven wings. She is at once, holy princess and warrior, the pauldrons and cavalry sword as familiar on her person as the crown on her brow.

            “Time passes over me, but I have never changed,” Hylia says, and her skin is silver, cold as ice. Its carved lines flow and slide over each other as her mouth moves, revealing veins deeper within of a perfect, shining light. The sun is gold, people say, it is gold and it is soft, but have they seen her, do they understand, that the sun is not gold, it is white; the sun is not warm, it is radiant and gleaming. She wears nothing, no mortal entrapments, not the robes and dresses her statues are carved with, and her expression is cold, imperious and proud, lofted as if to regard a distant star. Her wings are folded around her, so many of them that Link attempts to estimate and loses count. More spread out, so far that they touch the horizon. She is vast, she is cold, she is eternal.

            One of the wayward snakes of his thoughts is quicker-striking, and a bit riskier than the others. “What do you call that, then?” The village girl has gone on staring, seeing nothing, seeing a handsome young man unseasonably swaddled, until she realizes her bucket has overflowed and scrabbles with an embarrassed squeak.

            “Surface moves. The depths remain. Waves on the sea don’t stir the coral in its belly. Time flows, and it brushes me along the surface. I learn, and I grow. Sometimes, I forget, but even in those times, my core is the same. Has always been the same. People oversimplify. They only see part of me.”

            “S’pose you never _show_ them just part of you on purpose, and let them think what they want, huh?” Impudence has decided to silver his tongue today. Perhaps it is that after three months, and a handful of life-or-death experiences, he is actually getting accustomed to Sheik’s presence.

            The red eyes of a sheikah, the dark eyes of a princess, the shining eyes of a god, crinkle upwards in a faint ghost of a smile. “Smart. But don’t change the subject. We’re talking about you.”

            He huffs, and plays with the tassel on his flute. It’s easily one of his least favorite subjects. For all of his words to Sheik, _let them think what they want_ is a bit close to the chest. Other people are sensible. He can watch them, and piece them out, the marks they leave on him. It stains, like dye on the skin, when it’s shearing season and the whole village is carding and dying and spinning as fast as they can go. But dye, you washed off, and found your hand underneath.

            This town, it’s too big, and too noisy, and too bright to be Ordon. The people here run thick with hylian blood. Blonde hair, dyed if it isn’t natural, crowds out reds and browns, and most of the eyes that look their way are blue or gray. They aren’t pale, not like Zelda is, but their color is all given by the sun, brown and freckled. The Gerudo passing through, an older woman with her scarlet braid knotted neatly at the nape of her neck, stands out. In a way, it’s like Ordon. Outsiders always stick out.

            With a slightly put-upon tone, “There you go, you just did it again.”

            “Huh?”

            Sheik’s pale brows lift, just far enough to disappear under his hood. “Your hair.”

            He pinches a strand of it before his eyes. Brown, streaked gold by the sun- blonde enough, but not strikingly so. His fingers, still with his scabs and scars, the hangnail that he was picking at, are dusted with freckles, light-colored and sunburned.

            “Guess so.”

            The brows that went up come back down again. “It doesn’t bother you at all?”

            They’re not going to go back to playing, it seems like, so he tucks his flute away, sorts it until it’s positioned safely in his pack. “Still don’t see how it’s all that different from what you do.”

            “Because everything I am is true. If I am Sheikah, it is because I bowed my head before my ancestors, studied their lessons, proved myself as a young man and my mother’s sister pierced my ears as witness. It is because I fast with the solstices, abstain from unclean meats. If I am a princess, it is because I was born a king’s daughter, raised in a palace, educated by royal tutors to conduct with propriety, to fire an arrow, to manage a household and offer prayer to goddesses. If I am light, it is because I was born light, because I have always been light, because long and far across the sea of time a man brought his pale, gasping wife to the edge of the sky and begged me to give her life, her own, and another, that had already perished inside of her, and because I answered him, because the woman lived, and I was born again, her child, I have been light, and flesh, at the same time, ever since.”

            Sheik’s hand spread, and closed. Though he could not see the light through the wrappings that covered it, he could feel the prickle of reply in his own skin. “It is because I let the ignorant assume that because I am one of these things, I am not any of the others, that my truth becomes a disguise. But you?”

            He knows where this is going, so he sits back, and closes his eyes, and lets Sheik’s words flow over him without complaint or argument.

            “When I met you, you were Ordonian, with rounded ears and darker skin. When the forest children greeted you, you were one of them, slight and pale, a child’s body with a fairy’s eyes. When we passed the southern shore of the lake, you were Zora. Now, you look as if you were born here, and you do it carelessly, without thinking. You are an acorn that grows into a sunflower until someone walks by and pronounces it a tulip. Why?”

            “S’nice that you remember being a god, but y’get not everybody does that, right?” He cracks an eye in Sheik’s direction, not entirely wanting the other to be cross with him, but he’s feeling cross himself. “Maybe it’s that thing you were saying. I’m all those things together.”

            “You are not,” Sheik says. “I would be able to tell. Any of the things you were in the past, you are not them right now.” He pauses, seeming to shift it around in his mouth, and then changes tactics. “Why do you _want_ to blend in?”

            “Why do you?”

            He says it half to be smart, but Sheik breathes deeply, and sets about tuning his harp as if he just remembered he was holding it. “Wisdom is a process. My core does not change, but the world does. Even my memory is incomplete. What looms ahead of us, I must see clearly. To do that, I have to travel. I must look at people who would never meet the eye of another part of me. Otherwise…”

            A grimace, a private grief. Link regrets that he asked only to be smart, but Sheik continues; precise, undeterred. “I will act in error. I will fail to know the true value of what I choose.”

            His attention returns to Link. “Now, you.”

            It feels sort of like a trap, for Sheik to indulge his scatterbrained questioned so deeply and sincerely. He really doesn’t have an excuse. “You’re kinda scary.”

            “That wasn’t what I asked.”

            “No, but I guess it’s related.” He takes his own steadying breath. “That bit, you said, about how you know who you are, ‘n who you’ve been since time started. You said you forget sometimes. What’s that like?”

            “Limiting. Vexing. Like suddenly losing your left hand, and finding yourself reaching for everything with a limb you do not have any longer, only you can’t remember the loss, so you just find yourself wasting time. Trying to learn something for the first time, but feeling as if you are an adult in an infant’s body. You can nearly remember, how easy it felt, how certain you were, imagine turning that corner like you could just reach out and grasp it. Instead, you implore the infinite emptiness, looking for the piece you don’t have. Struggling. Failing. Hearing your fingers stagger clumsily through the strings, and knowing, somewhere inside, you once made the gods weep with your song.”

            His face must have fallen, somewhere in what Sheik said, because the other catches his eye. “Not what you were hoping to hear?”

            “Yeah. I guess… was hoping maybe I’m like you, and just outta luck, ‘cause I’m stuck forgetting, or something, but I don’t get that. Lotta stuff is easy. If I’ve done it before, or I haven’t. But I think I’m just good with my hands, and I like to mess around, so I’ve tried it before or I’ve tried something like it, or it’s just not that hard. Y’learn to whistle with grass because you’re bored, and then a flute, you gotta blow into it the right way, too. Chase someone off with a stick once and you’ve got an idea for what to do with a sword. Not all of an idea, but, it’s just… your body knows what to do with it all.”

            “I don’t feel like there’s something I’m trying to remember. Maybe my problem is I remember too easily. I think if you left me here for a year, I’d forget I was ever from anywhere else.”

            “I don’t think that would happen,” Sheik says, but the certainty has thawed- it laps a bit cautiously, like water, at the edge of the conversation.

            Link snorts. “Forgot my mom, didn’t I? Then I didn’t think I’d forget the Kokiri, going to Ordon, but I get back and jeez, Mido’s short, and was he always that much of a brat, and it’s so dark here- if I go home after all this, I probably won’t even be able to find my way through the woods.” He shrugs, tries to grin. “Then I’ll be a stalfos and not have to worry about anything.”

            It seems to answer enough, because Sheik lets the conversation lie, but in the spreading silence, Link is left with the distinct impression that he has said the wrong thing.


	2. Shadows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Within the citadel of his power, Ganondorf prepares himself for the war again.

            In his barrow below the world, the Demon King prepares for his death.

            He gathers his tools to him; a great brazier, a stone basin, a knife. The knuckles of his hands are crossed with small scars- they bend and crease with his movements- but his distinctive gilded brand flickers, gleams, and casts its own light.

            That he will die is a ticking inevitability. The forces of the kingdom gather against him once again. The hunting horns sound, and he has found himself with back to water. The question that lies before him, thus, is how deeply can his tusks bloody his foes, what fragments of himself can he drive into them, leave to fester.

            And, for the part of his mind that frets more than it rages, how he can streamline his return.

            Death is an easy act. It needs no introduction, really. Even for a creature with such rarefied and resilient flesh as his own- standing over the bowl, he draws the knife from its scabbard, its gleaming blade flashing silver against the light of scarlet flame and golden mark.

            He pulls it across the palm of his hand, grips once against the pain and then splays his fingers and lets the wound weep into the basin.

            His blood is as restless as he feels- veins of magenta strike through it, a tangle of golden eyes attempting to forge themselves, put out tissue to contain it. It grips the side of the basin, throws limbs over it, panics.

            Placing his uninjured hand on the rim of the basin, he sparks light over its surface. The forged flesh thus stricken trembles, collapses, surrenders itself into a swirling liquid.

            He bleeds himself two more times, pausing to stun it each, before he looks over the contents and decides it is sufficient. With a wet squelch, Maliceflesh sutures the gap, growing thick cords across it that flex, but do not break, when he tests his hand.

            The knife has tarnished. Its glow has vanished, and he sets it aside with indifference. He will renew it later. Now his attention turns instead to the brazier, stirring coals with long fingers. The fire awakens with sonorous roar, strikes nearly from the bottom of its container to the ceiling, and he, standing in exactly the right place, casts four shadows from its light- each one pinned as if with a faintly imaginable _smack_ to its respective alcove.

            “Can’t do anything without us, can you old man?” The first crackles, its words playing across its lips the way that lightning plays in gathering storm clouds.

            “Watch your tongue, brat. You’re as old as I am,” he tells it, without real heat. Thunderblight does as it pleases. And it will obey, importantly enough, by that very youthful impatience- building resources on its own is not as immediately rewarding as taking what it is given, and letting its conjurer do the ‘hard work’.

            The shadow steps forwards earnestly, tall and strapping. A recollection of a time when he was, he supposes, handsome- a young man of hard-won good standing, vain of his physique, all in close-fitting things that sacrifice the sturdiness of armor for the simple pleasure of showing off.

            Thunderblight would be those things, except for the metal spikes driven through him- electrodes that had stopped his heart and seared his flesh.

            An execution fit for a tyrant, they had said, back then.

            Thunderblight grins at him, and fishes blood out of the basin, cups it lazily in hand and tips it to his mouth. Fleshed in Malice, he is different- a wild mane, a twisted, nearly featureless face. The electrodes twist until they are a strange placement of spines, like swords

            Such monstrosity is his greatest art, and his safest defense. A man is a dangerous thing- it thinks, schemes, and hates, and these are known qualities. But a beast does not think, merely destroys. Words that are told unthinkingly to children, woven like bedtime stories.

            They do not ask why the Demon King brews sandstorms, or sends plagues, or emboldens raiders. They accept that it is because he is a monster, and because monsters destroy.

            He once hated this. But now he has learned- it is useful. The piece of himself he casts into Thunderblight had not been saved by being handsome and playful and charismatic, by his ambition, or his youth. He had not been remembered kindly, had not been forgiven, had not been spared an execution claimed holy.

            It is better to bury that fragment, the smiling young man just beginning to squirm in his convict’s robes. Thunderblight the demon, with heavy arms and wicked hooked weapons, who crackles with arcs of deadly light, with an uncooperative heavy jaw that clatters and snaps- is safe.

            It stands back, its charms and mane clattering, and lofts its head, the jaw still hanging at a cocky angle.

            The second shadow has not spoken. It waits until it is spoken to, and when he turns to face it, it stands taciturn, with arms folded. Waiting for orders, because even if he has always been obstinate about subordination, he understands it well enough- enough for his pieces to make use of it.

            “Come forwards,” he tells it, and it does, a bit hesitantly, still watching him with a tacit challenge that makes it clear this abdication of power is not fawning. The second shadow cuts an imposing, broad-shouldered silhouette in heavy armor, one that would seem imposing, perhaps valiant, if he did not wheeze with every small breath, if the cavernous schism torn in his cracked ribs or the knotted scar wound about his throat were not so obvious, even without flesh.

            Died like a lion, he had, that time; before he had so many deaths, before they had run out of meaning. His first had been undignified, scared, coughing blood and weeping for his mothers, screaming he’d come back and kill them all, in equal measures, begging, raging, sobbing- things Thunderblight, preserved in the image of life, does not usually let in its surface. But Windblight is different- a martyr worthy of a storybook.

            He had wasted almost a decade, ultimately, forging himself in that image- pride, elegance, decorum, even as someone only ever graced with the terms of bandit warlord. And most importantly, he had tried to become unyielding, unbreakable. He had buried, destroyed the fragile youth of Thunderblight, built a castle of himself. The noose hadn’t killed him; it had fallen to the sword to do the final, wretched work.

            Windblight has no breath to waste speaking, anyway. He won’t subject himself to parting his jaws to drink, but instead cups the blood with both hands, and drips it into his broken ribcage. That, at once, becomes maw all its own; rib becomes tooth, tattered cape seizing his arms to form the shape of wings. A heavy head, a broad, masked shape- likeness of a companion slaughtered long ago.

            Thunderblight’s energy and arrogance is exhausting, but there is a vexing thing to Windblight, as well. So proud and stubborn, setting aside quiet pieces of himself for Helmaroc, for other lieutenants in his forces. _Honorable_.

            It had not preserved him.

            Mindful of the dimensions of the space, Windblight flaps its wings once, then folds them across its shoulders, covers the gaping aperture in its chest, withdraws to that alcove. Thunderblight is already fidgeting restlessly, the jingle-clatter giving it away even if Ganon doesn’t look to it.

            The third shadow, sensing its call, has started to wail.

            This, he thinks, directing it an irascible eye, is certainly the worst of them. Much as Thunderblight and Windblight have their own senseless ideas, they are reliable and useful. He sends them out far more than the other two, if he can help it, but, as he reminds himself, this is a situation where he cannot help it.

            It fills the entirety of its alcove, larger than the other shadows. He has tested its limits, found that only the external space confines it. But it cowers, squealing and braying and whimpering, incoherent sounds.

            With no patience for its misery, he swipes up the blood himself, and splatters it onto the shadow. At first, its piteous sounds get louder- he _struck_ it, it seems to be complaining, he has no respect for its misery and now he _hit_ it- but it reluctantly abates, sniffs at the blood, gives it a cautious lick, and coalesces.

            Of course he has no patience for Waterblight. He endured those years, the long flight through the dark, at times conjured back to the world of men, at others, simply running in the dark on hoof and paw and whatever else he might shape underneath him. The years lost to fear, panic, each subsequent death coming down and driving further distortion and anxiety, when all his desperate trembling mind could think of was another way out of the trap, flee or feed or tear into whatever came close to him.

            Time wasted, was Waterblight. Ambition and misguided honor at least had their uses. And here, the strongest of his phantoms, greatest in size, and it insisted on weeping and bawling, lacking even the bare decorum of _Thunderblight_. Its heavy body settled with a thump on its trotters, the limb it has sacrificed by shaping into a great axe crashing down, the rest of its body dragging, half in the shadows. The ritual room is small, unfortunately, and Waterblight at least has the presence to force itself smaller to fit. It shakes itself, nearly satisfied by brief creature comforts, before hunkering down once again, whimpering.

            The fourth shadow steps forwards unbidden, and as he turns to it, their eyes meet, not in master and servant, however insubordinate, but something else.

            He has never been able to erase the sense that Fireblight is judging him.

            “Anything you want to _say_?” He demands of it, draws himself to his full height- reminds, in a moment, the Blights of their place. They are imperfect fragments, of which he is whole and culmination. Waterblight a beast, Windblight a martyr, Thunderblight a young upstart- he, who has lived each of them in turn, and come where he is, carrying his scars; they exist at his whim, by his power, and Fireblight is no different. Even now, for it to accept flesh, it is to serve him, to subject to his power, _his_ will. _He_ is font and master of Malice, however differently Fireblight might once imagine that.

            The shadow stands taller than him, its hair playing in tongues of languid flame. He knows little of its death- the shining cross-scar on its brow is not one of his.

            (Not? It is not as if he never wakes from an illusion of cold metal at his brow, forced downward)

            After a moment, its head bows, only in directing its attention to the basin and away from him. A broad hand, edged in scales or feathers, he is not certain, scoops a handful of blood and retreats with it, to coalesce privately. He and the other three wait in different forms of trepidation or impatience, hearing the sound of sinew and bone snick-crunching into place.

            Finally, there is Fireblight, elongate mane and heavy tail, gaping jaws and hanging arms. The eyes are gone, but nonetheless he senses its gaze.

            He banishes from his thoughts the lingering doubts, steps to the head of the room. Unlike ordinary troops, he need waste no time dispensing commands. The Malice will guide them, so long as it runs in their veins, and if it were to cease, they would not have veins for anything else much longer. Now that they are bodily, they understand him, precisely what he intends for them, and they _will_ obey.

            He snaps his hand out, a cutting gesture across the distance, and they vanish, with such certainty as if they were never there.

            It is after they are gone that he turns, regards the room and empty, stained brazier, and sinks heavily into the throne at its far end. The ritual room is small, and not built for comfort, but it is warm, and it will indulge him for the moment.

            Time to make his farewells to it all. He would not look for it, once he returned. The Deep Castle, the surrounding city and its people. He has done well, this time around, good work. Tonight, above him, the blins feast and dance and sing. Celebrating the anniversary of the city’s foundation.

            So quickly, it comes upon him. Distraction is his vice, no matter how often he tells himself life is limited, precious, that he must work quickly, and only on such things that will net him advantage when his proud enemy and her emerald-robed executioner return in their campaign. He always finds himself spending it on futile, wasteful things. Now he has a city, and so much of this cycle has been consumed by it. For fifty years, it has become an obsession. Just this morning, before the burning in his hand spoke warning, he had been fussing over details of ceremony- penning some speech to give to his people.

            He sinks deeper into his chair. He’ll disappoint them, he supposes, but they’re used to such. They’re well used to him being of capricious moods. The people of the underground are not so easily deterred by the idea of monstrosity, but they’ll imagine him an enigmatic god well enough.

            “Sir.” A breath of air stirring in the room, a shift of crimson fabric.

            Ganon does not lift his eyes. “Ghirahim.”

            The spirit’s pale skin nearly glows in the dark, smoky room. “Chancellor Drov was wondering where to find you, regarding the address.” Then, not forcing him to voice his own conclusions, a flat gray eye sweeps over knife and brazier, the cut in the hand he’s leaning against his temple, and, primly, “I will tell him you are indisposed.”

            Ordinarily, he welcomes such presumptions. They were very scarce, when excavations had initially unearthed the spirit. For a worn relic who had the presence of mind to feel every year and every spot of rust, Ghirahim was impeccably precise, still keen, still focused, and it was much better, in Ganon’s opinion, when Ghirahim permitted his own edge to carve into the situation. It was what had turned him from an oddity, another refugee to Fathom, to one of his most efficient retainers.

            This time, however, he raises a hand, before Ghirahim can simply flicker out of the room. “I’ll be with him shortly.”

            The eye lingers on him, its match nearly visible beneath the curtain of Ghirahim’s bangs. “…Sir,” it is not quite argument or question, but creeps edgewise at both. A work in progress, he supposes- one day, he’ll get Ghirahim to actually ask him a damn question directly.

            (And he isn’t sure why it seems so important. He can certainly understand when Ghirahim is _trying_ to question something.)

            “I’m not an invalid, Ghirahim.” He stands in a single, sweeping gesture. “I was merely distracted.”

            Ghirahim’s face does not move, but his attention cants fractionally to the remnants of blood magic in the room.

            “Of course sir,” he says, with a shallow bow. “Excuse the presumption.”

            He knows what Ghirahim would say in this situation to anyone else- has witnessed the spirit’s lashing scorn, as precise as a master fencer with a sharpened epee, lashing out at anyone who has made the mistake of speaking carelessly. He can nearly imagine it in that lofting, imperious tone- _‘Distracted, sir? Distracted enough to conjure the Blights, a handful of hours before you are to face your own populace? There are several words for that sort of thing, sir, and the glance in the average dictionary would enlighten us all that ‘distracted’ is not habitually one of them.’_

            Or perhaps, even simply, more calmly, _‘Sir, you are a very bad liar, and that complicates my performance of the precise duty you have directed to me.’_

            He would like to be able to idly wonder what prompts such uncharacteristic meekness from Ghirahim, but, looking towards the corner of the room still faintly marked with soot, the truth is he knows.

            He knows, and thus, he knows that confrontation will do it no good. Instead, “Ghirahim.”

            The spirit unfurls himself briskly at the summons. “Yes, sir?”

            This isn’t as easy as navigating sidelong looks, or being a fly on the wall to hear the way Ghirahim addresses others. For all of their collaboration, Ganon does not understand him very well. Zant is not merely an open book, but one who is prone to flinging from the shelf to lie open at his feet- it takes very little external stress to send Ganon’s apprentice sobbing in frustration into a table about the unfairness of this or that provided the slightest facsimile of a concerned ear. While it may be a different story for much of his council, regardless- Of his various attendants, he selected them for many reasons, but certainly paramount among them is that he can _read_ them. Ganondorf Dragmire has been many things, at many times, to many people- _trusting_ is not a thread found in many of those faces. He prefers others’ hearts where he can see them, and, necessity come to it, access them for a better grip.

            Ghirahim, merely, reminds Ganon much of himself; someone who would sooner choke on their own blood than admit a dagger found its mark. Figuratively, in the latter’s case; given the state he was found in, it was quite apparent Ghirahim didn’t have any blood.

            He considers several ways to say what he wants to, and ultimately, with a dismissive sort of air, “Were the last round of repairs successful? I’ll need you at full strength.”

            It’s an order. It is not soft, coddling, or fretting. The spirit responds precisely, his hands behind his back. “Extended exertions may prove a problem. I will subject it to more rigorous testing, and report the results.”

            Ganon reminds himself to respond as if he is mulling it over tactically; easy, because he is. The other side of that sentiment does not need to be voiced. “Don’t exhaust yourself on hypotheticals. If you’re still weakened, then saving your energy might do you more good.” Then, before the conversation can dig further, “that is all.”

            He can feel Ghirahim watching him.

            Then, “Of course, sir.” A faint ringing sound, and the spirit simply flickers out of the room in a cloud of diamond-shaped motes.

            A certain petulant part of Ganon reminds himself, rather loudly, that as King Under The Mountain it is fully within his power to dispense a royal order, lock his doors, and sleep the rest of the day. Entirely too many parts of Ganon are _tempted_.

            Ultimately, he grants himself simply another long-suffering sigh, remembers that time is precious, that he has a limited number of days left now, and instead, he gets to work.

           


	3. Da Capo al Fine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At the beginning of the end, Fi finds the master of stories.

            She finds Farore at the edge of the camp, when the rest of the troupe is going to bed. She can guess that the other came here in search of quiet rather than discretion, since the Fairwood Players are a radically accepting sort.

            They have to be, or Fi would not be here. She has discovered this, about mortals. If they were moved to terror or awe by the Evil’s Bane incarnate, then they were dubious, wary, or even cruel to a foreign dancing girl with false arms and a too-clever mouth. But among the Players, she can stumble as much as she likes, she can hang in the air too long, or lay out a Wolfos with a kick across its chest that staggers a beast three times her size, and she is praised, she is appreciated. Fi the Dancer is not questioned. She is strange, but she is Fi, after all, and she hears them say this, all warmly, their mouths turned up around the single syllable.

            She is not evaluated within a category of humans, in which she is a defect human; or within a category of weapons, in which she is a negligent weapon; she is evaluated, instead, as a single specimen, of category Fi, in which she is incapable of being any metric of a failure. To be alone in the world, but by that, unable to be measured as a failure- that is where she finds herself. Be it blessing or curse she isn’t sure, but faced with the sense that it will end soon, she finds herself hesitating.

            She is fond of the Fairwood Players. She knows that they have been fond of Farore, though the goddess did not introduce herself under that name. Her usually impeccable memory halts, in fact, over the specific recollection of what name _had_ been given; if there really was a name given, or, if rather, there was given a space with the sense of a name.

            Farore is only ever Farore, after all.

            “You are leaving.”

            “Do you know that?” Farore’s skin is warm in the firelight, but the shadows of her eyelids are blue. The night takes her as one of its own, climbs in her dense, wild coils. Her dress is a humble thing stitched of piecemeal fabrics, what can be gleaned here and there and darned over time; it is the dress of a wandering storyteller, bare steps above a beggar, but beneath its hem, her bare feet touch the rich earth; it throws forth a bouquet of white flowers to kiss its mother.

            It is a rhetorical question; a conversational dodge, like a parry of steel ringing off each other. Fi will not blink, nor be deterred. “There are a handful of other reasons why you might have sequestered yourself this far to the edge of the camp. I can think of more than I have considered, but, there is no purpose to that.”

            Farore’s head shifts, indulgently. “Oh?”

            “Moonhallow will be here three weeks from now. It is traditional to give out gifts at this time, especially to children. However, you gave the troupe’s children gifts, all of them, after they had gone to sleep. This is not common practice for you; you tend to wait for occasions if we are between villages. If we are staying somewhere, that creates aberrations- you will hand things out sometimes because you are feeling generous, or because something they said made you especially happy, or you saw it and thought of them. But we were not in town recently; we will not be until later. The obvious implication is you are giving them Moonhallow presents early, because you know you will not be here, three weeks from now.”

            A long slow sigh escapes the goddess, her hand stilling on the pages. Just like herself, the book on her lap wears tawdry raiment over the crownless glory of divinity. But perhaps that is not merely camouflage, or concealment. Her eyes sit in tired folds. She is worn at the edges, blotted by broken pens; pages yellowed, dog-eared and torn. She is not the proud tree she usually is- the spine of her bends, bows over the path.

            It is distressing to see her so. Fi is not young, herself, but she ages as silver ages. Edges dull, tarnish creeps in; impermanent things, to be repaired by the renewing warmth of fire. But Farore cannot be reforged- not she, a thing from ages before metal, one last bastion of the great immortals.

            “Dear Fi.” Farore moves her hand, and Fi sees the section she has open; she can read it, upside-down, knows the words to this, because it is her own story. Forged at the end of the war, from a piece of pure silver that had spent a hundred years lodged in the trunk of a holy oak. Not touched then, not wielded, but entombed alive, laid to sleep, and there, to await the awakening hand.

            She had danced with him, when he had come to her; he was the one who had taught her how, the right way to flicker and cut through the air. She had loved him, the way a weapon loves its wielder- to feel warmth and certainty, to be held, so close to life. To taste flesh and blood- for she is holy, but she is a weapon, and she hungers for such things. She is not a woodsman’s axe, or a tanner’s knife- she is made to bite and tear into living things, and she did, besides him. Killed, hacked open, and drank of her enemies. Consecrated not by the long, slow, green peace of her birth, that lulled her to sleep in the dreamless times between ages- but by blood and weeping ghost, curse and darkness, such things that stained her hungry silver teeth and filled a belly that did not truly know satiation.

            But it is not the glories of war she remembers, to think of him, but when he would rest, with her scabbard by his side. When the dark grew troubling, and it was not the company of other soft, mortal things he sought out, but the reassurance of the strength she offered. Such things are not written in Farore’s book; for what is written there are the legends, the stories. In those stories, they are Hylia’s instrument, spirit and wielder as one. They are holy, they are grassfire and harvester’s scythe, scourging the undergrowth of filth and corruption.

            They are imperfect, of course, as legends are. She looks at the image of him illuminated in the pages, and finds frustration in the gallant, tall man in shining armor. That is not him. But she does not rebuke Farore- it is not her fault. All creatures were ultimately made of stories, and so woven of those threads, they tangled, ran amok, in such a complex way that even she, the great storyteller, the spinner of them all, she was not master of the legends. Merely mother; merely keeper.

            “Dear Fi,” Farore says again, and there is a weight in her eyes, eyes like deep gray stone. “Your burden was such a terrible one, wasn’t it? Evil bane, hunter of demons, she who bleeds immortals. What room was there left for you in life? Are you happy now, without it?”

            “I am needed again.” It is not a question. She does not believe in phrasing things as questions that are greater than ninety-percent likely to be correct. Statements can be wrong, but if they are not, they do not need to be corrected.

            “Do you want to be?”

            That draws her pause. But, she supposes, it is a fair question to ask. The times that she followed blindly to be drawn, they were not born of precision or facts. They were born of duty- more accurately, they were born of a desire to be needed. Out of love. Out of wanting to see him again, to be by his side, to stay close to him through the bright days and dark cold nights. To dance.

            But she was young then. Young, and, in the way of young things, narrowed in scope. Her younger self would not have the words to answer that question; she had never been taught for it. Merely that she was an instrument, that she was _needed_.

            Does she want to be?

            “I miss him.” She says, first, because it is a true statement. Missing someone is precise. It is a feeling like two centuries ago when an ambitious thief pried the gemstones from her hilt, plucked out her bright eyes, and left their sockets dark, the way that they still itch with the absence. It is not a physical need, she does not die without them, but regardless, they yearn for completeness.

            Then, because it is not that simple, “I will miss the players. When I leave. I think they will miss me, as well.”

            She remembers the excited way they had spoke, a few weeks ago. That they might be able to perform in Castle Town; a grand show, with more than they usually had, lights and costumes. All of the older troupe members, piling their money, trying to see if they had enough, maybe they could take this or that extra job to pull in a bit more, at the next town.

            “I want to see Castle Town.” Because that was also a true statement. “I want to go there with them. I want to help him, but, if it is at all possible, I want to find him on my own. I don’t want to simply be a tool that waits for use.”

            Farore smiles, softly, and the expression warms a bit of her tired face.

            “…They will miss you, too, when you leave.” Fi hesitates. “That’s what you are doing. Today.”

            “Oh, yes. Before I’ve the opportunity to regret it.” She says, as if regret does not creep in as soon as it is considered, as soon as it seems necessary. As if leaving behind presents for all of the children to find when they wake is the behavior of someone without regret.

            Then, suddenly, “There’s so little left of me, Fi. Of all of us. We’ve been giving pieces of ourselves for so long.” Her gray eyes are forlorn. “We are dying. The world we made, that in turn, made us- is dying.”

            Farore’s gaze falls to the book. “At the same time, what a wretched thing to ask of you, to ask of him, to ask of the three of them. What creators we are, if we can do nothing for our children but increase their burdens.”

            Fi steps forwards, across the distance. She does not know the right thing to say with her face. She has had a long time to consider it, and has not ever quite gotten it down. But gestures, and touch, she thinks she understands, and so she brushes Farore’s bangs from her face with metal fingertips, rests it against the goddess’s cheek.

            “I was born for this.” She says, and it is true. It is true not in the way she believed, a long time ago, because Hylia told her those words, left them until they clattered in her head in her shining, metal dreams. It is true, in the way that she has had time to be something else. She has liked being a dancer. She has liked being part of the Fairwood Players. She has liked stages, and music.

            But she remembers the taste of blood, and the warmth of campfires; she remembers the steady rhythm of a horse at full gallop jostling her scabbard. When she is idle, working around the camp, she looks to the darkness and finds herself tempted to wander on her own, to find a cause that is true and reminds her of the feeling.

            She was born for this- not the way that Hylia had wanted her to be, but the way that Fi, the only creature of her category, and thus, the definer of the parameters, wants to be. She will decide her actions, and her course.

            Farore leans against her hand, and smiles, with all the love and heartbreak a mother can muster.

            “I think you will do very well for yourself, Fi.”

            The goddess’s hand makes a harsh movement across the book, then- sends it flipping back to the beginning. It is too much for the tome’s aging spine, which unravels with the final creaking sigh of breaking time. Pages dance, briefly, suddenly, in the night wind, like birds, or bats. In the firelight Fi catches glimpse of them all, the beautiful stories that have woven this world, each one of them imperfect, yearning to be more.

            Heroes, princesses, gods and mortals, demons and wars, are carried away from her, from the book, and somewhere, Farore is lost among them, as if no one was there.

            The book sits empty on a tree stump, turned to its first page, blank.

            No, not quite blank. In the far left corner, appropriately between the margins, where a beginning would be- a single blot of ink.

            It feels wrong, to leave the book there. She steps towards it, to pick it up, and hesitates before her fingers are under its cover. Realizes the weight of it, the implication of what she might have thoughtlessly done.

            Might yet do, but not thoughtlessly.

            _You take up the weight of the world like you don’t even realize what you’re doing_.

            The words had not been directed at her, but at him- but she was by his side, and she had heard them. And they were true, she supposed, for both of them.

            But Farore’s question lingered with her.

            _Do you want to_?

            To be Hero and Weapon again. It was a distinct question from seeing him again. It meant, at least, less time for her to be a dancer. It would mean leaving the Fairwood Players, not now, as Farore had, but somewhere in the future, with plenty of time to regret in the meanwhile.

            And, yet. It felt wrong to leave the book there. Farore was a thing of the earth- she certainly did not mind earthworms and insects, dirt and leaves, being rained upon. But she remembered the goddess’s tired eyes.

            Gently, softly, she closed the book, drawing its cover over that precious beginning the way one might tuck their ailing parent into bed. Gently, she lifted it in her hands, and tucked it against her chest. Walked back to her tent, in a circle of wagons that was now, ever so slightly, smaller.


	4. Beginning in Hoarfrost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zelda grieves. Sheik leaves home.

            It is autumn when King Bharos sets out on his hunt for the beast of Lake Hylia.

            She tells him not to go.

            She tells him what she saw, what she knows.

            He pats her head, as if she is still a child, although she is on the eve of her sixteenth birthday, although, by the laws of their land she will inherit his throne when he fails to return.

            She tells him that it’s pointless. That swords and spears and holy arrows have never eased the Calamity’s anger and they never will. She tells him, when she is already beginning to give up and understand that nothing will change his mind, about the circling, circling movement of time, the legends and her studies, the arduous, piecemeal work she has done assembling proof of the things that she _knows_.

            He says his prayers to a lifeless, indulgently smiling statue and he leaves, and he cannot hear his goddess screaming.

            It is the beginning of winter when they make their way back, a single boat returned for a whole fleet set out. Priests bow their heads, consecrate and bless an empty coffin. They lay it down, in the royal tombs, the gilded bird inlaid on its face. With laurels and beautiful white flowers of all kinds to fill the space left by the body they could not retrieve, the body in so many pieces.

            She lays a single Silent Princess on the hateful thing, and leaves the funeral behind. The proceedings go on for a week, and they goes without her.

            Deep cold sets in. Snow, over the lake, over Castle Town. As rime climbs the towers, she watches through the windows, walks the halls. She is untroubled, because she is deep in grief, the retainers say- she is unreasonable, she cannot be approached, a fragile thing, ever since she had been born, colicky and screaming from the belly of the dying queen.

            But she is untroubled. They leave her be.

            The halls are full of people like Bharos. Old rulers, pictures of a storied bloodline. In their portraits they stand tall and valiant, wordless company.

            She can name them, in turn.

            Rhoam, torn apart by the Calamity Himself.

            Hesperine, poisoned on desert campaign in a battle with a demon scorpion.

            Her only child, Prince Verace, fled to the wilderness when his mother’s usurpers seized the throne. He resumed power, became king, was killed late in his life while hunting a boar. Not a demon, that one, but it needed not be to rob them of a ruler. The hunting of the Calamity’s likeness was outlawed for a time.

            Salsonia, the one who revoked that, depicted in full armor with the spear she used for slaying beasts. She had bled the Calamity, and paid the price when pestilence ravaged her kingdom- the blood plague of a century past. The queen herself had perished, not on a battlefield with glory, but coughing phlegm from her lungs, consulting any stranger or mystic who would promise her salvation.

            Her immediate successor was shrewd, and kept a lower profile. Elmia was thus one of only a few who lived to old age, and passed the throne to the younger of her two sons. The older was haunted by demons, fled into the wilderness and only returned to decapitate his brother and seize power for himself.

            Sometimes in the portraits she sees herself, rendered a stranger by the artist’s brush. Times she disliked- where the cherubic young girl with rosy cheeks and shining eyes coyly lingering by the skirts of a relative she had truthfully deplored awakens deep unease, where she can remember standing in that dress, staring down the back of the canvas, and wants to believe she looked nothing like that.

            Times she tolerated, where painter’s tools, or, recently, pictographer’s lens, were more truthful. Her own visage, stone-faced, back at her through the ages.

            Even then, she cannot say she is pleased, coming to a halt before one of them. The centuries may pass, but she does not escape the sacred line.

            She can recall that life and its history, both living it and reading it afterwards. The eyes in the picture are the same as hers now. Knowing what would come, what would inevitably repeat.

            Even now, she is numb to the halls of her childhood home. She walks them as a ghost does the land of the living, footsteps softened to silence by the knowledge it is not hers any more.

            The chancellor has grown a second mouth. She hears them, their tongues twined together, as he bemoans Bharos, how it is such a pity, the king himself not old, having lost his lady, his only daughter so young and tormented by his passing, and she hears the lashing venom of the second mouth- _she is weak_.

            It creeps the veins of the court. A handful at a time, it infects, until they speak with fangs themselves, spread the words- concern that she will not recover from her torment. Over-bright encouragements to ride in the fields, to come out where her public can see her, they are worried about you- and in hissing undertone, _it is time for you to smile, become another portrait for the hall, to lie to the people and show them that their sacred line is unbroken_.

            Unbroken.

            Unbroken.

            Unbroken.

            She gathers what she can to her, and conceals it, buries it in a corner beside the well.

            The rest, she destroys. Years of collection, of interest, of curiosity, shattered and torn and burned.

            There will be no place for them. They are already gone. What she breaks now is only the empty shells of it, she tells herself, when her vision swims traitorously at the fragments on the floor, when Ania the maid, coming in search of the noise, sees her and screams.

            They take her from her room while they clean. Her hands are pried open and the cuts treated with salve until they don’t bleed. The room that they place her in is as white as the snow outside, white sheets, white curtain, white carpets.

            Nothing here is hers.

            Nothing here is particularly sharp, either, she notices.

            She does not know what the whispers are doing now. When she is spoken to, it is so coated with honey that she cannot make sense of it. They mean well, they believe, all of them.

            On the third day, Ania brings her favorite heavy comforter, a deep blue thing with golden embroidery. “I couldn’t stand the sight of how dull it is in here,” she says, stubbornly, as if Zelda has answered her anytime in the previous days. “Begging your pardon, my lady, but it doesn’t suit you, this ugly old room. Fetching you up like this. And they won’t even let Lady Impa in the castle- like she’s not your own aunt! The nerve of it all! His Majesty’s turning in his coffin at it all, goddess bless him,”

            She can’t. She doesn’t have blessings left to give.

            But Ania continues on, straightens the curtains. Thumps a potted daffodil on the windowsill, forcefully (the container is sturdy, does not shatter). Vents her frustration, the chancellor’s audacity, the treasurer’s rudeness- pours words and fills the room with life. Finds the dishes from breakfast, and scoffs at that. “If they treat you like a sickly thing the least they can do is feed you like one! I’ll get the kitchen to make you something proper. You poor thing, you can’t afford to lose weight in this cold.”

            “Ania.” Her voice is thin from the days of disuse.

            The maid stops, about-faces wide-eyed. For all of how she has played as if nothing is wrong, the silence has been chewing on her.

            (It is the face that people make, when they see their goddess. It is not a face of reassurance or comfort. It is a fragile, servile sort of awe.)

            (Awe- something only so far from horror.)

            “Thank you, Ania.”

            It is sincere. Ania has been kind to her. She knows that the daffodil is symbol of camaraderie, but she knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, Ania picked it because it is bright and common. She can imagine Ania, huffing in irritation, leaning over the shelves of a shop stocked by a hothouse- _something yellow, that’s just what she needs, in that poor dreary room of hers. No one ever disagreed with a nice yellow flower_.

            Ania has only one mouth, has only ever had one mouth every day of her life, and it is fixed stubbornly on a sharp, strong jaw.

            She opens her mouth, and it is an effort to not pour words in desperate, wavering deluge- _leave the castle, Ania. Run. In springtime, this monster will wake with the thaw and it will eat you if you stay here. You don’t deserve this, Ania. My father deserved his, and I still tried to beg him to stop._

_They won’t make a portrait for you, Ania. No one will sing like you, or remember you, even fond lies of you- go back to the hills you came from, with the daffodils and your dreams and that blushing girl you always wanted to marry, the one who waits for you in the evenings by the gate, run and take her with you now, before the thaw, because it will come early this year, and they’ll get rid of you, they’ll make an excuse and you won’t believe it._

_You work hard, Ania, and you’re stubborn and smart and everything they don’t think a serving-girl should be and all they need is an excuse, to pry you away from me, to get me alone, to convince everyone in town that when they lock me up it’s for my own good, and that’s all you are to them, an excuse._

            Instead, she says, “I will be cloistering myself for midwinter.”

            “Cloister? In your state, milady? That-”

            “I believe it is exactly what I need, to clear my head.” She speaks before she lets Ania get a head of steam and indignation. “I… might hear my father’s voice again.” She lets her eyes fall, and the darkness behind them needs no facetious source. “Know how to move forwards.”

            Poor Ania believes it wholly. She can watch by the fractional softening of that stubborn jaw, as it creeps through the cracks and wears down stone. “…Well… I suppose, it would be nice to get away from those prattling jays for the holiday.” A bit stronger, “I don’t blame you, milady. They’re right pests.” But she wavers again, looks back to Zelda. “…You’ll send for me if you need something, won’t you, milady?”

            All too relieved, she clasps Ania’s hand in both of hers, pallid fingers and gilded brand against soap-scoured bronze. “I will _always_ remember you, Ania.”

            Ania goes, to spread the news, and leaves behind a blue comforter, and a single golden daffodil.

            Zelda spits the poisoned teeth of her second mouth away from her, and closes her eyes.

            _If I am to be truly selfish, Ania, I hope someday you forgive me._

            The rules of cloistering are very specific. The attendants that attend to Zelda’s needs are blessed, robed and veiled. They have no eyes and no tongues, that they cannot defile the maiden by gaze or speech. She washes in a freezing spring fed from deep beneath the ground, three times, and at the third she is robed in undyed cloth. No jewelry enters the sanctum; before its doors, her attendants press themselves flat to the ground and stay there.

            She alone walks forward into the castle’s heart.

            Before Hyrule proper had been raised above the clouds, to maintain her purity, leaving behind the green fields and tall mountains worked by the lesser peoples, this place had been made, and now it was the only remaining piece of that ancient castle. It had been painted, once, an ordinary chamber, more adjoined to the room around it, however holy. An ancient battle, however, had scorched it white, destroyed anything else that might have dwelt here until there was not even soot to mark the walls.

            The reliefs here are not like the portraits above. It is not people they depict, but gods not honored anywhere else in the castle.

            A thousand panels of sunset glass gather into the corded sinews of a young woman, a warrior. Her red hair is twisted in a high, ragged knot behind her. Her powerful arms are sixfold, each banded with gold: the first raised to cradle the sun against the sky; its match holds the moon before the earth. The middle two arms hold a pair of labryses, spread as if to hew her enemies; the final two are cupped in front of her chest. Her breasts are uncovered, and between them, her ribs gape open. From the wellspring of her heart weeps the blood of the burning earth- she kneels to facilitate its flow, but her high, proud face, lifted to regard her first creation of dawn, shows no sign of discomfort.

            Still adhering to her tradition, Zelda bows before Din- initiator, destroyer; the many-faced. Dancer and warlord, whose feet shatter the ground. Cycler of sun and moon, ruler of days and seasons.

            “I strengthen myself in your image,” she says to the relief, and moves forwards.

            Emerald light wafts warm through the second window. A mother, seated on the stump of a great tree. Though it is felled, it is not dead- green runners spring from all corners of its vast rings. A black hand rests on her pregnant belly; with the other, she holds aloft a goat’s horn carved into a flute. The forests around her teem with wolves, their heads thrown back to the sky. She wears a peasant’s dress and the heavy golden jewelry of aristocracy; flowers fill her wild hair and the trees around her are heavy with ripe fruit. Fields of golden wheat stretch in the shadows between the wolves. A grand book lies open on her lap, nearly crowded by her growing child, and nestled among its pages- a single rabbit, so young that it has not yet opened its eyes, but it sleeps safely among the wolves. Her eyes are kind, but gleam like molten gold, a crown of antlers raised from her head, the pelt of a bear draped across her shoulders.

            Again, Zelda kneels, presses her branded hand to her heart and brow. Farore- all-mother, giver of life, queen of bounty and treasure. Patron of artists, inspirer of bards, of the overflowing earth and the wild, untamed lands.

            “I will surrender myself to your lands, soon,” she says. Her legs are beginning to cramp in the cold. She rises, proceeds regardless.

            It is the third she seeks.

            The sea in the final relief has been rendered a smooth black mirror, unto which the stars gleam in perfect mirror of the heavens above them. The light that seeps through this is watery and blue, though it rests in the same wall as the other two, though they are enclosed by rock and buildings and no true sunlight has flitted through them in centuries.

            Here is a depiction of woman whose history has been etched so deeply into her face that it is not clear if her eyes are anything but deep holes between the wrinkles. She stands forlorn among gravestones, clutching her ragged robes, but a singular gleaming star crowns the apex of her brow. Her harp, she holds before her, and the clutching hand is not empty as it first appears- instead, carved bones- a fortune teller’s tools, a gambler’s instruments, poke from her fingers.

            It is before Nayru she lingers the longest. A midwife now long gone told her she was born under Nayru’s stars. The dear old woman does not know how true the statement is. It is Nayru, the fate-carver, master of the ages, the final sovereign that anyone in this world someday faces, who set Zelda on this path long ago.

            “ _Guide me_ ,” Zelda says, and she is not sure when her prayer became a whimper, but there is no one here to witness her breach in etiquette.

            She does not wait for an answer, regardless. But she rises, and walks from the Sanctum, walks in the way of creeping fog. The attendants do not hear her. The gate guards do not notice her pass.

            Impa sees, waiting at the door to the castle with a white loftwing gripped by the reigns. She watches, with cautious eye, as Sheik mounts the thing, a bit unsteady for being so long confined. “Steady, nephew,” she tells him, a bit sharply.

            The outcry will not arise until a week later.

            They will be gone by then.


	5. Crossroads

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Link arrives in town.

            The sun seeps into his eyes despite his best attempts at keeping them closed, and, so, he supposes it is probably morning.

            He sits up slowly, clumsily, working the kinks out of his shoulders. It is springtime only tenuously, the ground still frozen in places, and not really warm enough to make sleeping outside less of an ordeal. He has bundled in three stolen layers, and rising to his feet, his fingers are still numb. He rubs his hands together, blows on them, and looks around.

            Breakfast is probably a good idea. Trees are budding, but he can’t exactly count on fruit this early in the season, whether that’s from the forest or a farmer’s orchard. This isn’t Ordon, after all. Back home, the raw energy of the Deku Tree, the proximity of the Woods, meant that things grew even directly through the snow. Nothing could silence the life that surged in the forests’ roots, not famine or blight, not the cold of winter. And those roots covered everything, even far from the forest’s border- such power seeped into the humblest crops.

            No, this far north, a little late frost eats its way through the plants as sure as wildfire. Kind of a problem, that. It means he’ll have to find a town, or hunt the messy way, since they’d taken his sword, and he isn’t about to go back there to retrieve it.

            That also reminds him- a faint jangle of metal as he shifts, brushing the sleeve aside to bring his wrist and its attached manacle to eye level. He also needs to deal with _that_. That’s going to be a pain- Hesput Town had actually been prosperous enough to afford iron to hold its prisoners, not like the ropes he could escape like second nature at this point.

            To avoid company, he’d slept well away from the road, but, giving it a cursory sweep, he needn’t have bothered. The only tracks are several days old; nothing fresh.

            Epona is waiting for him a little further into the trees. True to form, she hasn’t found the evening disagreeable, but her loyalty to her master stretches only as long as there are sweet, fresh grasses close to him. Likewise, she isn’t especially interested in moving before she finishes the clump of early, hardy clover she’d discovered. He leans against her side, more in resignation than an actual attempt to budge her. She has spent much of her life as a plow horse, and even with the both of them grown, her shoulder stands well over his head.

            It’s still a nice place to stop and think, the warmth and reassurance of a larger animal, the rise and fall of her sides.

            He tries to remember the dream he’d been having. He has a feeling he’d dreamed that kind of thing before, traveling with a stranger, playing a song together. Idly, his fingers find his flute, put it to his lips, try to string together the notes.

            Epona’s ear perks, and she lifts her head to stare at him briefly. A moment later, deciding it was not her song, she shakes her mane with a huff and goes back to eating.

            That seems to be the only difference. Looking up at the sky, he feels like it isn’t as if there’s no power in the melody- but, rather, it’s missing something. He might have recalled it wrong, from the dream.

            It’s possible, of course, that it was just a dream, that his mind had just invented the tune, the place, the boy who was sometimes a girl and sometimes a god. That was, he guesses, what a normal person would make of it. Maybe even after they’d had that person appear in dreams several times- different places, different conversations.

            But, well. He looks at his hand. The back of it- a pale shape, a bit too even and perfect at the edges for a birthmark or burn, a flicker of gold in the veins. Then turning it over, the manacle, and below that, the black shape on his wrist, a single letter.

            Three reminders he was not a normal person.

            He sighs, tugs his glove back over the mark, as best as he can with the cuff in the way, and tucks his flute back in his belt. Breakfast first. Then think about what it meant.

            The countryside here is more pasture than wooded meadow; larger, more prosperous farms with cattle instead of goats.

            He eyes one of them that’s lingering particularly close to the fence, and then remembers it was not _that_ early in the morning, and not _that_ far from Hesput Town, and an entire cow is not something that could be dragged off discreetly.

            The cow by the fence lifts its head, watches him with eyes that are docile, but only to a point.

            He goes back to walking, Epona unfazed by his side.

            The signpost says this was Kalahuk- and here the roads are paved with scattered cobbles. In the distance, he can see a windmill turning placidly in the bracing air. The miller is leaning on the fence, hair braided and then stuck together with a wooden pin. Black hair and brown skin, but when she looks up to him, it is with green eyes and an easy smile. “Hey, a traveler. Not every day we get someone coming out of the south like that.”

            It’s just friendly, just making conversation. She means no harm by the fact that he is memorable, but, knowing that anyone who followed this route looking for him might find something dries his tongue in his mouth. “…Ah- yeah?” he manages.

            (‘Yeah’, as far as he is concerned, is a divine gift to language. It is a boneless word, practically a sigh, and can be uttered fairly reliably regardless of his emotional state. As long as he can muster himself to produce a noise, ‘Yeah’ would save him.)

            “Yeah,” she concurs. “Course, not a lot of people traveling these days. They say the whole world’s cursed. Me, I’m not the superstitious type- Gran used to salt my shoes so the crossroads demons wouldn’t get me and that kind of ruins it for you- but this sure is a late spring we’re having, on top of all the other bad news. Got enough hay for the cows, but this time last year, we had three fields plowed and seeded. This year? Ground’s still frozen.”

            She has an easy manner, and is easy to talk to, and he can find himself loosening up a bit. “Huh.”

            The miller’s eye flicks over Epona. “Probably harder for you. Can’t imagine it’s easy to feed a great big horse like that on the road. Here,” she’d been holding an apple, perhaps part of her own breakfast, but fishes the knife from her belt and takes a slice off it that Epona is all too happy to relieve her of. Something of Link’s expression must have given him away, because, with another good-humored look, she offers him one as well. “Course, you got to eat too, right?”

            Remembering the cuff, he takes the slice with his right hand instead. “Thanks.”

            “Where you heading in from, traveler?”

            “Goathorn Village.” At her look of no recognition, “S’ in Ordon,”

            The miller whistles, impressed, and has to move the rest of her apple since Epona is now trying to make a grab for it. “You’re a long way from home. What takes you out this far?”

            “Yeah,” he says, again, finishing the apple slice. “Lookin’ for someone. Or somethin’.”

            “Or something?”

            “Not sure yet. I’ll know it when I find it.”

            She laughs, easily. “You sound like this scholar that’s been in town the last couple of days. Real weirdo, that one.” Lowering her voice conspiratorially, “Brought all this luggage with him off the train, paid Torm a king’s ransom to set up in his old stable and get left alone. Maybe he’s a sorcerer!”

            Link nearly chokes- he sputters and coughs, and the miller bursts into wide, earnest laughter. “Ain’t that wild? I’m kidding you. If he’s a sorcerer, what’d he be doing in a dead-end dump like Kalahuk instead of making golden birds for some rich lady? Nah, he’s probably some stuffed-up royal scholar who just don’t want us dirty backcountry folk getting our mitts on his precious books. S’just local gossip, anyway. Don’t mean to be scaring you.”

            She waves him on his way, but it is a while up the road before his nerves actually settle.

            It turns out, not everyone is so certain about the local scholar.

            “Well, I’ll tell you,” the butcher says, tongue loosened by Link’s business, “didn’t think much of the man when he showed up- some foreign feller, from his accent, but the first day, he comes in here askin’ me about cow’s blood! I tell him, we’re honest, goddess-fearin’ folk around here, and goddess-fearin’ folk don’t tamper with blood, and he ain’t asked since, but what’d he even want it for?”

            The town farrier, who he ends up talking to by accident, because he hadn’t realized the shop wasn’t deserted and thought to poke around the tools- but fortuitously, the woman interprets him as considering new shoes for Epona- has something to say as well. “Dresses like a pompous rooster, alright, but he minds his own respectably. Came into town with this great puffed up red bird strutting around after him. Huge! I hear noble folk ride birds, but me, I’ve never clapped eyes on one before now. Thing looked like it could’ve snapped my arm off!”

            (He isn’t sure he wants to see a bird that could snap one of _that_ woman’s arms off. They are quite substantial arms.)

            An older man sitting in the shadow of the tree by the middle of town, leaning on his cane while his grandchild plays in the mud nearby, overhears the conversation and regards him wryly as he leaves it. “Young pups like to yap. Don’t pay it too much mind, son. The most of them, they’ve not seen a traveler from further than Hesput or Greenburg, so they get all stirred up. Whatever his business, if we leave him be, nothing foul will come of it.”

            A young woman, caught in the act of feeding kitchen scraps to a yowling cluster of stray cats, blushes and fidgets with one of the small braids by her face, ones that she has threaded small sprigs of early-blooming highland flowers into. “He’s quite elegantly mannered.” With a glance back at the tavern door behind her, “and he leaves very nice tips. Some of the townsfolk, they make such a mess, but he- I, I should go.”

            Watching her retreat, and left alone with the cats, who are now considering if he might have more treats for them, he glances downward. “…wonder if they’re gonna have this much to say ‘bout me,” he says to his new audience.

            A white kitten whose fur sticks up in odd clumps plants its front legs on his shin and screeches at the top of its tinny little voice. That is not a request he can refuse, so he partitions off some of the jerky he’d bought and offers it before moving on.

            Torm lives on the western edge of town, but is not in attendance at the moment. His son is out in the field, and amiable enough that he didn’t really need an explanation, which is good, because Link is not entirely sure what he would’ve said to him.

            The scholar, it seems, is in attendance, and answers the door immediately to regard him with a foreboding expression behind polished brass spectacles. That the expression is at all intimidating is rather impressive, as he is nearly as short as Link himself, and far wirier of frame, and there is also a pen stuck behind his ear at an angle that suggested he had entirely forgotten it was there for some time.

            Regardless, it manages, and Link is, as always, unfortunately the type to be easily cowed in verbal conversation. “Uh.”

            Purple eyes flick the length of Link’s body in brisk assessment, and one ginger-haired brow climbs above the lens of its spectacles. “…May I help you?” This is ventured as less of a threat, and more of a question. It seems, at least, that they are mutually thrown by each other.

            “I, uh,” On reflex, Link rubs the back of his neck, before remembering he has done so with his dominant hand, and stows it by his side once again. Meeting the scholar’s eyes, it’s clear that was not fast enough- but he doesn’t seem actively scared- just _intrigued_.

            “Well,” he says, shifting the door wider, “I expect this would be better discussed inside.”

            Inside is doing its best impression not to look like a stable at the moment. Everywhere is hung with great sheets of black cloth, blotting out the light that seeps through windows or between the slats of the wall. Costly crystal lamps pierce the gloom with amber glows, lending an air of immediate strangeness. More swathes drape boards propped across derelict stalls, turn them into worktables on which various glass phials and fine-looking instruments are scattered in an array he cannot make sense of.

            He is struck by the smell of it- the metal, the chemicals. Mouth half-open, he draws a deeper breath merely to make sense of it all.

            In that time, the scholar himself has pulled over a barrel- empty, from the ease by which he handles it- and makes use of it as a seat. “…So. I will confess, I don’t usually keep company with warlocks.” His expression shifted. “or, witches? The way they handle such things out here leaves, if you don’t mind my saying, a few things to be desired-”

            “M’not a _witch_ ,” Link says, pointedly, and wishes it carried further, were stronger-voiced than anything else he’s said all morning.

            The scholar blinks, taken aback for the moment, and Link supposes it _is_ the most words he’s strung together at least in this conversation. Adjusting his glasses, expression a bit owlish, “I merely mean that you’ve rather obviously run into trouble with the authorities. The cuff notwithstanding, that character below it- _lhos_. Middle Hyrulean, a holdover from a previous time. In the times of the great blood plague, it was burnt into afflicted houses- even people. Signifying ‘lost’, as in, lost to the Calamity and its rage. Now, these days, obviously, it means something other than you have a literal demon in your blood, but-” he reads the look on Link’s face, belatedly, frowns, and starts fiddling with a copper kettle on one of his worktables. “Do you take tea?”

            “…Uh,” Link manages.

            He is not sure what the scholar discerns of this information, but he finds out a few minutes later when he is presented with a simple, but well-made earthenware cup.

            Well, alright. He took tea then, he supposes, and samples the contents. They are not disagreeable- this seems to be the source of the warm, prickling smell that clings to the scholar and his environment alike.

            “…Well, I don’t mean to impose, but while we’ve quite addressed what you are _not_ , we haven’t quite arranged who you are.”

            “Oh. Link. From Ordon.”

            A nod. “Southern side of it, by your accent. Curious… Link, not a name you’d expect to find in a place like that. Old Hyrulean root, from _Lanhe_ \- ‘holy path’, approximately, though I’ve seen some translate it as ‘pilgrim’s road’, depending on locale and context. Were one of your parents, by any chance..?”

            “I wouldn’t know.”

            The scholar’s mouth clicks shut. A moment later, “…You’ll have to excuse me, sometimes I’m so mind-numbingly stupid that one wonders how my masters at the university ever put up with me. Genealogy is such dusty work that sometimes one can wholly forget that it’s attached to living people. I once badgered a grieving widow for several hours about her dead husband’s third cousin. I’m hopeless, really.”

            He moves on, just as briskly as he had said that, in the act saving Link from having to decide what possible response would be appropriate to that. “My name is Shad. History and language are passions of mine, so, as soon as I completed my apprenticeship, I knew I had to set out for Hyrule. This land has a greater wealth of ruins than anywhere else in the continent- quite possibly in the seas beyond. It’s such a remarkable country, I could talk about it for hours- but, you… did need something, correct? You don’t seem the type to be motivated by pure curiosity.”

            Shad. Alright. Shad. Link takes his time, burying it in tea while he chases the words around his head, hunts them down, pins each of them until he has half a sentence assembled before he looks at the thing and sees it wilting in his mind’s eye. He sets the cup down, cautiously, and exhales, and resolves to attempt the first thing that he can string together. “Wh’d’y’know about dreams?”

            It’s certainly not the ugliest approximation of words he’s clung together, but, he pulls a face at the texture of it regardless.

            Shad blinks. “…Of the sort that one has occasionally at night?”

            “Th’ sort that repeats.”

            A pause. Violet eyes study him with interest and sharpness that Link is not sure he knows what to feel about.

            “Well,” and then the wind is blowing again, Shad speaking so quickly and precisely and not stumbling on a single syllable, in that enviable footloose manner. “There’s a few contemporary perceptions- some believe dreams predict the future- love life, finances, frippery like that. If the layperson could predict our windfalls so easily in a moment’s repose, every pauper would live as a king, if you ask me. But there are some arts for scrying the future, some that are quite well-documented magicks. If you’re going out of your way to question more than a local doctor or small-town mystic, I would imagine you haven’t found a lot of satisfactory answers where you come from, have you?”

            This, at least, can come out easily, lubricated by a huff. “No.”

            “And I suppose it doesn’t help that you seem to have some difficulties asking questions.” Shad peers at him a moment. “You aren’t cursed, are you? Plenty of those afflicted with troubling magic are mistaken for practitioners themselves, when it’s more of a-”

            “ _No_ ,” this was sharper, and he felt bad for it, raking a hand through his bangs. “M’ just bad at talking. Learned how late. Messes with things.”

            Shad’s brows loft, but whatever conclusion he’s reached, he doesn’t launch into another river-rapids tangent, which Link is grateful.

            Instead, a bit softer, “…You had an interesting childhood, didn’t you? Do you… remember much, from then?”

            “…Malon said they found me in the woods.”

            “The woods. Woods around Ordon. And wearing green. There’s a small-town superstition about that, if I recall correctly. Fairy color, not meant for mortals.”

            Link picks at the hem of his tunic. “…Nothing wrong with it,” he says, a bit defensively.

            “No, of course not, but, just- like I’ve said. Interesting childhood. There’s a thousand small town superstitions. I could forsake every other facet of the world and dedicate the rest of my life to notating their rise and fall, and I’d be an eminent scholar indeed. Not that I’m about to. Regardless- you’re no witch, and you say you aren’t cursed. This dream of yours..?”

            “S’ something important, and someone I know, and I’ve never seen either of them. But I’ve gotta be there when it happens. That’s the problem.”

            Shad refills his teacup, and considers for a period of time that makes Link uncomfortable. Then, tapping his fingertip on the rim, “Well, you’ve risen in my esteem as unlikely to be lying for attention. That sounds exactly as vague and frustrating as most accounts of prophesy I’ve read.” Sitting back, as if he is against an armchair and not perched on a barrel, “it sounds as if you need to hit the books.”

            Link gives him a rather dry look. “Can barely talk, what makes you think I’m good at reading?”

            And yet, there is a merry glint in Shad’s eye. “Oh, believe me, I was speaking figuratively. No, while I take to books a bit more than I presume you do, my brand of research is, how do I say, _very_ accessible. Provided you’re an athletic sort.”

            Something in the conversation has changed, and Link is not entirely sure what it is, until the part where Shad cleans up the teacups and kettle, sets them aside, and picks up a well-made but somewhat worn pack. “Incidentally, there’s a _lovely_ barrow just a short walk north of here. Have you seen it?”

            _Oh_. _So that’s where this is going_.


	6. The Barrow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Link and his new employer get to work.

            The barrow sits on the crest of a hill overlooking Kalahuk Town, or at least it seems to at first glance. Shad explains that, in reality, it _is_ the hill- that over the ages, pastures and fields were laid across a massive earthwork construction.

            “You can think of ruins as a living thing, really. The land doesn’t die merely because humans stop using it,” he puffed as he climbed, breathless, beaming. “It grows, it changes, it shifts with an earthquake or is built over by a new settlement, or becomes a nest of one thing or another. Certainly, archaeologically it’s a shame when something promising is overtaken by the common skultula, just for example, but well, that’s… I don’t mean to presume, but, you look like the sort who can _handle_ yourself.”

            The back of Shad’s head is an interesting target to watch. Link is not out of breath as he is, can pause to look over the setting and the surroundings, the sun as it moves higher in the sky. He might have some trepidation about this, but, Shad had promised to pay him, coy allusions that the ruin would ‘work out in his favor’ notwithstanding, and that assessment is not, precisely, wrong. “Mhm.”

            “It’s a fortuitous providence that finds us together, isn’t it?” Shad pauses to swipe sweat from his brow. “Days like this, you can nearly believe that Hylian legend about the world being writ in the storybook of the gods. Of course, if it were really a story, I’d have swept up here in a gallant haze of discovery. This hill looked so much shallower from the sky.” Glancing back over his shoulder, “I don’t suppose you’ve some _trick_ that would speed this up, do you?”

            Link blinks back, uncomprehending of the playful insinuation in Shad’s tone. He somehow doesn’t think picking the taller man up would go over well. Besides, if that was what he was asking, that sounded nearly like flirting.

            Shad, undeterred, simply turns his eye back to the climb. “Ah well. It’ll be easier on the way down, anyway.”

            The tip of the barrow- what Link had at first thought was the entire structure- rises from the top of the hill like a shallow, upturned bowl missing a crack. Its roof is heavy with withered ivy, rotten leaves from the previous autumn whispering underfoot. Shad picks his way through between the cobwebs and detritus, and has nearly vanished down the hidden stairs within before Link catches up to him.

            For a moment, they are descending in darkness, Shad whistling to himself cheerfully- then a violet-colored spark flicks to life, floating above two of Shad’s extended fingers. It casts its light over ancient metal timbers, settling dust, the fragile rootlets of grasses.

            Shad catches his inquiring look, and smiles, the expression eerie as the light reflects on his glasses, hides his eyes. “Just between us, eh? Not that this isn’t a charming town, but, well- I’m sure I don’t need to lecture you on _superstitions_.”

            He descends further, still in a good mood, and Link finds himself watching him again. So, he really was a sorcerer of some kind.

            It doesn’t matter, and he follows shortly, looking at the world the light illuminates. The shaft is steep and twisted on itself like a corkscrew; it winds down around a central gap with a rusting cable in the center. This, Shad tugs experimentally with his free hand. “They’d use this for a dumbwaiter, I suspect, while the barrow was being built. If we’re lucky, we might still find it at the bottom. Have you been in many ruins, Link?”

            “Uh, this’d…” He combs his thoughts, pauses, furrows his brows. “…be the first time, I guess.” His answer confuses him. Has it really? He feels as if he should remember something else. Instead, he breathes in the odors of metal and damp, chilly earth, of mildew and mold.

            “Oh, a treat for you, then.” Shad’s demeanor is much like his conjured light- undefeated by the gloom. His voice begins to echo just a moment before they descend through the ceiling of a large, domed room, supported by a circle of columns. “This, this is Harburian dynastic architecture- the middle ages, if you will, of Hyrule’s history, that grand romantic yesteryear every amateur poet seeks to recreate. Of course, it was also the time of the blood plague, the Scarlet Calamity. Who knows? Whatever hill liege or countryman of the peerage perished here, they may have been taken by the plague itself. I didn’t see a marker outside, but, that tradition of marking the tainted dead, that began when the Harburian dynasty collapsed. The Harburian kings were much of the mind as their immediate predecessor, Queen Salsonia. They thought to vanquish the plague with sword and holy arte.”

            Link has never heard this sort of thing before. It is not as if he is ignorant, or unschooled; but Goathorn Village had only so much it could spare its working hands. His education came at the hands of Talon, Rusl, and Bo- the former most often, the latter two when they could spare time.

            The center room is ringed with strange, squat statues. Shad nods to them, bright and eager. “Empty Soldiers- very popular at the time. They originated in the ancient kingdom of Ikana, what once lay in the southern reaches of Holodrum. Most tomb-builders sought to ward away or seal down the restless dead, but these in particular, the belief was actually that they would eternally serve the ruler they were given to, and go to war with intruders or thieves. Usually an empty ceramic shell- I’ve heard that in Ikana, a few were unearthed with human remains inside, but-” catching sight of Link’s expression, he laughs earnestly. “Oh, you don’t have to worry about these fellows. They’re quite dead. They were ensorcelled once, but, Middle Hyrule had long lost use of the ancient magic. That power’s faded, even if the rune conduits are still intact. I’ve been scanning the tomb for sources of power- its core burnt out a long time ago.”

            That doesn’t put Link entirely at ease, moving closer to study one of the Empty Soldiers. It’s hewn roughly in the likeness of a hylian soldier, wearing old armor, a buckler crossed in front of its chest, but there’s something about its vacant, staring eyes.

            Shad paces ahead, as Link can tell from the movement of his voice and the shifting of the light. “The main burial chamber should be ahead of us- oriented east towards the rising sun, that’s usually the tradition. …Hm. Something seems to be interfering with my compass; did you happen to note on the way up, relative to our current position…? Link?”

            The statue’s expression is sad. He’s certain of it now. The lines of the mouth, the droop of the lids over eyes that stare alert ahead.

            His fingers find the flute in his belt, turn and put it to his lips. He breathes in the air of the tomb, exhales in thought, a single overture of contemplation.

            What would an Empty Soldier feel? They’d fear nothing, he supposes, but, what would they want? How would you ask that?

            The song that creeps to mind is an old one. He doesn’t remember the old story it came from, but he remembers it was a song that Malon had sung for him, in the very early days, the days before he talked to anyone, and they hadn’t been sure if he was going to stay, or run back into the forest.

            He can picture it nearly perfectly, and draws his breaths along the timbre of that memory. Talon’s house, its smells and sounds, the crackle of the hearth, something cooking in the big dented pot, the creak of the rocking chair, the warmth of Malon’s lap when he had been small enough to fit there, a lost wild thing in a civilized house, on the verge of sleep. And over those sounds, her singing voice, such a certain and close thing that he could feel it vibrate in her chest;

            _O Hero, though you wander far,_

_It’s my fate to linger here,_

_I’ll wear the snowdrops in my crown,_

_And sing to the fleeting springtime birds_

_Let them find you,_

_Let them find you,_

_Wherever you grow weary,_

_I’ll fill the hills with my voice,_

_Until you come back to me_.

            _Until you come back to me…_

            The song ends, suddenly, as if it were taken from him- there is a shift of stone grinding on itself in the silence.

            The Empty Soldier is looking at him.

            Shad, too, has come over, and is staring in a way Link is not comfortable with, the sort of sharp, questioning stare he has never been able to answer, but, there is no mistaking it, the statue has turned its head, lowered its vacant eyes, and now it is watching him.

            _Don’t stop_ , Rusl’s voice seems to hum in his mind, the vision of a steadying hand over his. _Don’t do things halfway. That makes bad work, or gets people hurt. Your power is only evil if you use it to bring misfortune, but it is wild- just like you. It’s not a goat you can leave to wander_.

            He pulls breath, straightens the flute and keeps playing. The melody expands, moves, changes under the weight of what he wants to put into it- inquiry and concern. He pushes Shad’s reaction, the possibilities, the reminder of the cuff or the marking below it- out of his mind, away, and focuses.

            Why are they sad?

            The next sound is a larger _thump_. All of the Empty Soldiers around the edge of the room have stepped forwards as one, except the one he is standing in front of. But they do not ready their carved weapons, or raise their shields.

            Instead, a forest of stone spears travel slowly, to point towards a door set into the wall.

            A deep thrum echoes through the room.

            _Pain,_ they say.

            _The king is pained._

_He suffers; turns in his sleep._

_We do nothing for him._

_We cannot._

He plays back, a soft crescendo. _Why not?_

            Their answer is a sound like rain, a drumming, heavy presence.

            _Living._

_Dead._

_We intercede with living; thieves and necromancers. Intruders._

_We intercede with dead; angered ghosts, creeping resentment._

_We do not intercede with that between._

_He is between now._

“-Oh.”

            “What is it?” Shad is nervous. Looking at him, the haze of the melody wearing off, the certainty that tends to seize him in the middle of magic, it occurs to Link anyone would be, in this situation. “What did you get from that?”

            “They said-”

            The earth rumbles, turns beneath their feet in creeping sigh.

            The statues have returned to their alcoves, as if they have never moved. No- they are not the same as they were a second ago. They are reversed- they do not stand proudly on their pedestals, but face the walls, heads bowed. Shame and grief rolls off of them- and more importantly, from the door, a door whose timbers are stained in several places, Link realizes, does not know if they were stained before, or if that is new, if they were always straining slightly outwards as if pushed by an air their lock is yet holding against.

            “I think,” Link says, his brows drawn together, “they were warning us about _that_.”


	7. Blood and Bone

            The howling voice carries on the wind, reaches them where they rest by a stream. Sheik’s loftwing is a simple creature, used mostly to palace life, and it begins to shriek and flap. Impa’s is older, wiser, and merely tilts its head, blinks.

            Sheik soothes the panicking bird with a hand on its back. Impa simply finishes refilling the waterskin, corks it and stands with a scoff.

            “What is it?” he asks her.

            “Some ancient grief running wild, I expect. Our paths need not cross with it. There are a thousand out here, and we cannot hunt them all.”

            It’s fair logic, but something keeps Sheik’s eyes fastened to the horizon until a furl of wood smoke drifts on the horizon. “There’s a town close to here.”

            “What?” Impa looks, sees what he did, curses and mounts her bird. “Follow close.”

\- - - -

            At first, he thinks that the force of the sound will tear the door off its hinges. It bends, buckles, but the steel of its framing pieces holds even when one of the timbers cracks and weeps seething reddish ichor. It gleams.

            A sudden darkness- Shad has silenced his light, steps back and rests a bony hand on Link’s shoulder, motions for him to do the same. Together they pace as far back as the stair.

            The blood drips thickly from the broken timber, pools on the floor. Gradually, in barely breathing seconds, it stills, and its light fades. They are cast in deepening darkness, waiting. Silence.

            Link’s hand flexes empty on the space where his sword would rest. His heart is pounding in his ears, shaking, blurring his head, but he has to focus. Unarmed. He looks around- the barrow has old fragments of pottery, has the statues, has very little else.

            The force beyond the door bellows again. It’s pitched sharply- a scream more than anything. The stains thicken and darken on the door, cast new light as more drips to the floor.

            “Link.” Shad’s tone is urgent. “Do you know how to create a barrier? Or a seal?”

            The last thing he wants to do right now is try to _talk_. He shakes his head, hopes Shad catches the movement in the bare illumination of the blood.

            “Then follow my lead, as best as you can.” There’s something in Shad’s hand- a small piece of carved wood. He brings it up to his mouth, and it produces an unexpected clear note. The melody is fairly straightforward- it takes Link a moment to make sense of it, and a moment later to follow, find the gaps in Shad’s song and fill them with the flute.

            Like this, he can feel the thing beyond the door, the way it writhes and scrabbles and screeches. Like two pieces of metal dragged against each other, again and again, their powers clash. The clashing starts to chew on him, intensifying the frantic pace of his heart until it’s pounding in his ears- if there was only a way not to-

            The openings. Openings in the song. Not all of them are meant for his accompaniment- some of them are meant for the thing. They had to coax it into the pattern. He catches his breath and tries again, fills only some of the gaps, and weaves besides it a framework.

            Even then, it’s difficult. The king fights them. He is angry, he is in pain; he screams, and his entrails twist at themselves. The blood crawls across the floor towards them, strikes an unseen edge and trails along it, dripping lengthwise like a pacing beast. It hates, it burns, it wants- _wants_ , hungers. A ferocious resentment, staining the door, loathing it, and at their feet it sprouts tendrils, starts to reach up and paw at the fledgling barrier of song that separates them.

            Fear plunges in Link’s stomach. He has never, in his life, known something so single-mindedly hostile. Shad, out of the corner of his eye, is watching it, but he looks almost intrigued. Does he not realize? Can he not feel the enmity?

            Or is it that it does not hate _Shad_ the way it does him?

            The tendrils reach. Shad switches tunes, smoothly, effortlessly- leaving Link to repeat the barrier pattern, he becomes instead a warbling, fluid melody. The temperature in the room lowers; sparkling crystals form suddenly in the blood, shatter, spray fragments of themselves through the tendrils and disrupt their structure. They fall back into the blood as if there were never any body to them, and he resumes the barrier, new power flowing into it.

            A single eye opens in the puddle. It is bright and golden in the dark, like the harvest moon come out from behind the clouds. It watches him, sharply, and then, without Shad attacking it, slithers away under the broken door.

            Link realizes that he’s stopped playing. They are silent, both of them- Shad lowering his ocarina with a raised eyebrow. “Well,” the scholar says into the silence, “that was certainly an unusual sort of haunting. Triggered by our presence? Or in response to that spell you worked on the Empty Soldiers? Do you have a hypothesis?”

            The strength leaves Link’s upper body. He braces his hands on his knees, catches his breath roughly, feeling like he’s run a mile. “H-ho-how are you calm,” he manages, not sure if he’s about to throw up.

            A pause. After a moment, Shad awkwardly, roughly pats him on the shoulder. “I, suppose I might’ve warned you. Even Labrynna’s history has its bloodshed and regrets, and that’s nothing to what crawls in Hyrule’s burial mounds. Before the days of specific, carefully consecrated churchyards… though, I will admit, this is of _modestly_ unusual intensity.” He hummed his light song again, again holding up a violet glow.

            The floor is stained with a tangle of shapes that don’t look like the even flow that crept towards them. It takes Link a while to make out the silhouette of fingers- lots of fingers.

            A carpet of handprints.

            He’s still not sure if he’s going to be sick or not, but he just knows that standing upright means his face is further away from those. Trying to look at anything else, he studies the room.

            Realizes.

            The Empty Soldiers are still facing the walls.

            Shad has walked closer to the door, crouching to peer through the crack. Now, Link is certain- he can’t feel that, that hissing, aching, stinging presence; Link feels it inside of himself, burning in his bones, in his left hand-

            He tackles Shad, and a moment later, the door is torn open by a spray of blood.

            It writhes, grasps the walls and ceiling, and as the flow attenuates he sees that there is a creature in its depths, something from whom the blood is spilling, in a torrent that leaves only glimpses of emaciated skeletal arms, tarnished burial jewelry. The king was a tall man in life; now, even stooped, his hunched shoulders stand above either of their heads. He drags a once-fine sword over the stones, wears a heavy helmet without eyeholes. Its surface gleams in the blood-light as he turns to face them.

            The eye is larger now, the size of a man’s fist, and it is nestled on the king’s chest among a cluster of others. They spasm faintly, as if pulled by the beating of a heart, an opposing song- a soldier’s march.

            They run sidelong, around the edge of the room, and the king lunges after them, heavy feet and withered legs but a long stride and persistence. The sword comes down, misses them, cleaves the arm off an Empty Soldier.

            They complete their circle of the room too easily, come back to the blood that spilled from the door. It’s still seething, reaching for them as they get close to it. Link sucks in a breath through his teeth, remembers the flute still in his hands and the cowering soldiers.

            He lets that anger escape, in music where it cannot in voice.

            _Is this all you can do?! He’s right in front of you! He’s suffering! Isn’t this the exact thing you wanted to prevent?_

            A roll of stone. Bowed heads. Shad gripped his arm. “We need to-”

            _We Cannot_ , the statues lament.

            _TRY!_

            He’s shoved to the side, the note cuts off; the king’s sword comes down in the space where they were like an axe, spraying stones. Link lands on his side, harshly; his left hand is flung into the seething blood. The manacle lands first, and begins to rust rapidly; he can feel it crawling on his skin, clawing for a way in.

            He wrenches his hand free, stumbles, climbs to his knees.

            The sword comes forward again.

            A stone spear bites into the king’s arm. Blood splatters on a stone face, but it does not flinch. This is the one who lost an arm to the king’s earlier strike. It has no shield left to defend itself when the king swats at it, so it bears the brunt, its hide cracking from the impact.

            The king’s hand grips the weapon, struggling to break it off, corrode it with the weeping blood. Three more spears strike him, instead.

            Stone hands haul Link the rest of the way to his feet. The Empty Soldier steadies him, then pushes him towards the stairs.

            _Go._

_We will not hold him long._

_This barrow is not battlefield for the living._

            _You must be ready_.

            Link hesitates, stumbling, without words he can speak or play. Shad pulls his arm, and it reminds him to focus, but he still finds himself looking back at the flickers of gray in the seething light.

            “It’s a hell of a working, whatever you just did,” Shad is puffing, breathless, but not idly the way that he was on the climb, “but it’s not about to hold that thing forever. Even Hyrule shouldn’t have- revenants of that level of a grudge.”

            The daylight is blinding when they stagger into it, revealing where they are covered in dirt and smeared with blood, Shad’s bangs plastered to his brow and his glasses askew. Restlessly, the scholar seems not to mind, pulling himself over the threshold and fishing a bundled package from one of his pockets. He upends a double handful of emerald-green ash across the doorway, produces a belt-knife and nicks open his wrist to let his blood mingle with the dust. His work is made easier- the vines that covered the doorway are withering away now, shriveling to almost nothing. He drips in three places, then with surprising ease, produces a handkerchief and ties it precisely over the wound one-handed.

             Link eyes the vines, which have rapidly progressed to actively rotting. “I-…is that going to…?”

            “Hard to say. Probably not, but it does put some reinforcement on the straightest path towards us, and the village. Honestly, with the strength of that thing, I wouldn’t be surprised if it can simply pull the roof down.” Shad holsters the knife. “I feel I really ought to apologize to you. This is… it’s out of our depth, quite frankly. I have no idea how nothing picked up on this… none of my equipment, none of the scans… something we brought down had to have disturbed it.”

            “So we can’t stop it?”

            “Unless you have been greatly holding out on me, and simply enjoyed the refreshment of nearly losing your own head to an enraged ghost.” It’s one of those questions that doesn’t need a reply, really, nor wait for one. Shad discovers his crooked glasses, and straightens them. “The most we can do now, is try to hold it here, and warn the townspeople.”

            Townspeople that might not believe them, or expect it was their doing, and in the meantime waste time and stay away from…

            The crumbling of stones from within the barrow. The grass around its peak began to shrivel and die.

            He saw the cuff, where the blood had rusted it through. He thrust a hand at Shad. “Lend me your knife.”

            “Are you planning on fighting it with _that_?”

            “No, something else. But I need this,” he held his hand up, “off.”

            There is an all too knowing glint to Shad’s eyes as he looks at the manacle, and then looks to Link’s face. But he hands the knife over all the same.

            One of the spots of rust is right at the bolt that holds it closed. He works at it, feels the weapon bite into his own skin slightly, but simply grimaces and keeps working.

            Bloody handprints appear on the threshold; they encounter the dust and stop, pace alongside it one way, then the other.

            Shad flinches, as if something is causing him pain.

            A thunderous sound, dust pouring from the barrow’s ceiling. A handful of sparrows in a nearby tree panic and flutter away.

            The shackle breaks; just as the king comes through the roof of the barrow.


	8. Blood and Hatred

            A cloud of dust rises distantly on the horizon, borne aloft on warming spring air and echoes of old grief.

            Once-God lifts its head, scents in the wind, inhales and drinks deeply of the anger that boils there. It knows this- so few have such a prodigious depth and wealth to their rage. Even he, in recent years, has attenuated; has let himself grow soft, whether he believes he has not.

            It worries for him. The dulling of rage is the weakening of the body.

            But this, this is something. Not fresh, but distilled, aged finely and then awoken in a single great stirring.

            Once-God has taken several bounding strides forwards before it stills, tail swaying back and forth in contemplation. The orders that hiss and flow in its blood tug it forwards, but not to the root of that enmity. Near it, perhaps.

            And yet-

            Cold. Cold and light, not rage but scintillating enmity borne down on the top of Once-God’s head, a single strike without hesitation. In its mind, it can yet see Her, all regality, a bare foot pressed on the top of the stake, a moment before Her weight shifted forwards.

            The Malice that is Once-God’s current body boils and churns, nearly unravels but at the last minute, the master’s will presses itself back over the blood and smoothes it; a smelting heat that reminds Once-God of its place, its meaning.

            She is here. Of that, Once-God is certain. But the blood rebukes, certain of itself now- the knight is its priority. Rare and precious gift it has been given, rarer than being given flesh, called from the darkness by the master- a breath of gold, the scent of the holy power, of the fragment that it had once had, when it was not it, when it was not Once, but only God. That scent has pulled it far south, through the trees that tickle of its presence only in passing, through the basement of a chapel that Once-God did not fear, its echo of Her light an empty one.

            It is close. So close. The hunt has finally become interesting.

            But so is She. She is close. Once-God does not fear empty statues, but it fears Her, as it fears all things that it hates.

            But Once-God’s mind has been made for it. A useful thing, as, being Once, it has not that much mind left. It knows that much. Has to, because it remembers what it had been like, when it was not Once.

            It remembers the way all of sky and earth had felt when they had moved under its hands.

            But that is not its purpose now, to remember, to ruminate, to grieve or rage.

            It drops, heavily from the tree, lands on four limbs rather than two, and sets off through the rustling grass at near run.

\- - - - - -

            When the roof of the barrow gives, so does Shad, abruptly- he buckles to his knees, coughing. He pulls his hand up to his face, but one cannot easily miss the streaks of red that escape through his fingers.

            Link runs to him, takes him by the shoulders and tows him back as the king continues to tear his way upwards into the light. The places the statues struck are bleeding, but that does not drip downward- instead, it sprays and writhes as if grasping at the air, trying to pull him back together again.

            Shad’s face is white as paper, though his eyes focus on Link as they stumble together backward down the ledge. “Stupid- I shouldn’t have backed the seal with blood, it _uses_ blood.” His stained hand clutches. “Won’t be much help, I’m afraid.”

            He has no words for that, but someone else spares him. “Hylia merciful, what _is_ that?” The farrier, running towards them with the meek shadow of the cat-feeding girl, who barely suppresses a shriek at the sight of Shad.

            Link looks to Shad first, hoping he would answer, but the scholar’s eyes are closed. “Uh- bad,” he supplies. His mind, faster than his tongue, prompts; he shoves Shad at the farrier- she stumbles only faintly in catching him- and starts back up the slope. A loose stone by his foot- he seizes, aims, and lets it fly, clattering off the king’s burial mask. “HEY!”

            Few creatures ignore being struck in the face. The king’s head, thrown back, dangles on his shoulders, but his torso twists, the eyes there locked on him. A few drift towards the gaggle of citizens-

            _No_.

            He circles, picks up a piece of rubble from the sprayed roof and aims for the cluster of eyes.

            _Come on. Only me. You want me, you hate me, right?_

            The rubble is sharp, a stone cut by the eruption rather than one worn smooth by the weather. It sinks into the cluster with a wet squelch and a _scream_. When the surviving eyes reopen, they look _only_ at him.

            Three strides and the king is on him, the sword flailing in broad arcs. He has to throw everything into running, pushing himself over the back of the barrow and down. Away from the town, more room to run. But even this, he can already see that eventually his back will come to walls- there are more farms beyond the barrow. As it grew, the town had encircled the hill, leaving only the top of it bare.

            He acted quickly removing the cuff, but, without it, he finds himself hesitating. It isn’t that far from Hesput- he will be in danger here, too-

            _Focus_ , says the voice that sounds like Rusl. _You don’t have the luxury of staying idle. Something’s trying to kill you, is it not? And if you fall here, what will become of them?_

            “Link!” Shad’s voice is hoarse across the distance. “Stay away from it!”

            Good advice, he thinks; he can feel its enmity leering towards him, sharpened now with the thrown injury. As if there isn’t one thing bearing down on him, but two- the withered king, and the boiling rage that crawls inside of it. Curses come from far lesser enmities- by scent alone, this thing has the power to kill.

            Sensible advice, to stay clear. His heel shifts back towards the farms.

            Advice he is going to ignore.

            He finds the mask in the same place it’s always been, any time it comes back to him. The metal feels oily and cold under his fingers, and when he presses it against his forehead, he can feel that sensation spreading under the skin, crawling downward until it finds his eyes.

            The world brightens and sharpens. His mouth lengthens, and fills with teeth.

            The king’s sword comes up and down, but it is not so quick now. He springs on all fours, digs his fingers into the loam and comes around before the sword can pull free. Instinct angles him towards the throat, above the gaggle of eyes.

            They writhe and spin, intertwined- the king’s cold hand claws at his clothes and patchy fur. It grasps the lone horn of the mask and yanks- twisting the rest of his head with it, and throws him end over end. He shakes the dizziness from him, ignores the prickle of the blood on his tongue.

            The king dropped his sword. That’s his mistake- Link lunges for it, finds it heavy but not unwieldy and pulls it lengthwise across the king’s body when he attempts to close the distance. The tip of the weapon passes through the cluster of eyes, tears out several at the root, but they’ve recovered from last time. It passes as well through a rotting forearm, and while the king recoils, staggers back- the wound does not bleed.

            No- all of the blood, it’s merely been at the core of the body.

            How did he not see it before?

            The king lunges, now unarmed, striking with his remaining hand. Retreating on three legs is awkward, and the rear two of this form do not work so well on their own- he’s cuffed across the snout, grits his teeth and swings with the sword again, aiming to cut the arm, but his stance is off with the unfamiliar, heavy blade- the king evades, and presses on him again.

            Goddesses damn it. He puts the hilt in his teeth, uses all four limbs for running and pulls back from the fight. A shout catches his ears- he’s not sure which of the townspeople have spotted him, now, but he stifles a growl into the grip of the sword, and focuses. Teases a stronger line of power from the mask, swings his head to the side and throws the king’s sword back at him.

            It’s a clumsy move, but the king is a great, tall, dead thing. It connects, the hilt shattering a chunk of the king’s burial mask and he slumps, giving Link the opportunity he needs to lunge for the cluster of eyes in its core.

            He ignores the way it feels, the wet murky deep his arm disappears into, though it’s harder to ignore the way his hand feels like someone is pressing a branding iron into the back of it, from the inside out, throbbing up his whole arm. His fingertip brushes something- wriggles further, tries to reach, if he can just… a bit further…

            Light fireworks across his vision. He’s thrown backwards, tumbling, grass and sky and grass again, and for a moment, looking to the sky, he sees something- a white bird, silhouetted, and the person on its back, a shining arrow nocked and illuminating glimpses of their features.

            _Ah_.

            _It’s you again._

The feeling in his arm was climbing towards his chest, but he struggled to sit up regardless- he had to, take the mask off, or, let go of- the king, the thing he’d pulled from the king’s body.

            It was getting to be so hard to think.


End file.
